06 January 2019 1:36 AM

PETER HITCHENS: Why those few desperate people in dinghies really are a danger to Britain...

We aren’t grateful enough for the English Channel. Personally, I give thanks for it every day, but that is because I have been out in the world quite a lot and know just how dangerous our planet is.

That short, rough stretch of sea is what has enabled us to create one of the greatest civilisations in human history.

It is continuity, stability, peace, mutual understanding and long-accu mulated experience that make civilisations. Without them, the most vital ingredient of human society – trust – cannot develop or flourish.

Look at the rest of Europe, unprotected by deep water. Every century or so there’s an invasion, or a devastating war in which the enemy’s armies sweep through, burning, looting and worse.

A little further back, and you find vast movements of population, in which people who thought they were safe and settled were displaced or subjugated by stronger, crueller or simply more energetic and hungry peoples.

This process hasn’t stopped. China’s neighbours, and minority nations living under China’s rule, face a combination of ancient ruthlessness and modern secret police efficiency.

The Turkic people of China’s far west, and the Tibetans too, are being rapidly turned into dispossessed, humiliated minorities in their own lands.

People who moan constantly about the long-ago misdeeds of the British Empire are strangely silent about China’s steely modern colonialism.

And then there is the vast surge of humans brought about by those three Olympic-standard idiots George W. Bush, Anthony Blair and David Cameron.

Their various thought-free, vain adventures and interventions, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, have set the whole world on the move towards Europe, from as far east as Kandahar and as far south as the Congo.

Nobody can blame the migrants for seeking better lives elsewhere, but if they all do so, they will destroy the very thing they are seeking.

There has been nothing like it in modern times. If we do not check it, it will transform Europe into somewhere else in two generations.

Britain is far better-placed than other countries, thanks to the sea which surrounds us. But salt water alone will not do the job. We have to patrol it and turn back the uninvited. If we do not, the sea becomes an open door, with every beach a port of entry.

A lot of people are currently mocking the idea that the migrants making their way across the Channel are an important issue. They say the numbers are small. They were small, too, when they first began to arrive in Greece, in Spain, in Sicily and Malta.

Then word spread that those seas were open. And the numbers quickly stopped being small.

People-smugglers are not fools. They can quickly see and exploit any opportunity.

If I had anything to do with it, I would tow them all back to free, democratic France on sight and tell the French (correctly) it was for their benefit too. After all, if they knew they couldn’t get into Britain, most of them wouldn’t come to France in the first place.

And the fact they don’t want to stay in France proves they are not refugees, but migrants.

But if that doesn’t work, perhaps we could copy Australia, and pay (say) Greenland to take them in, unless they agreed to go home, with an absolute guarantee that nobody who arrived here illegally, or was caught trying to do so, would ever be allowed to stay here.

Or we can do nothing much, and say goodbye to Britain.

****

The ‘peaceful drug’ that’s causing carnage

Will it ever sink in? The authorities are still trying their best to claim that the knife incident in Manchester was part of some sort of terrorist grand plan. All that spending on ‘security’ has to be justified somehow. But the suspect has, in fact, been detained under the Mental Health Act.

Anyone with his wits about him knows that there are far more crazy people about than there used to be, many of them with knives, and it isn’t much of a stretch to connect this with the fact that the police and the courts have given up enforcing laws against marijuana, which some idiots still say is a ‘peaceful drug’.

Well, not always, I think. There’s been an above-average rise in aggravated assaults and murders in the first four US states to legalise marijuana for recreational use. And Finland and Denmark have recorded significant rises in mental illness since 2000, also following an increase in marijuana use.

Cannabis laws, it turns out, don’t greatly increase the numbers of people taking the drug. But they do mean that those who do use it, use it more heavily. Amazing that, as the evidence of its danger piles up, we should even be thinking of legalising it here, as the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby wants.

****

Everyone in the Army knows that service recruitment problems began when the job was outsourced to the unloved Capita. But the latest idea, actually begging snowflakes to join up, must be driven by desperation. Why try to hire people as soldiers who don’t like fighting? Next, look out for a campaign to recruit people with a fear of flying for the RAF, and people who hate getting wet for the Navy. Or we could just get rid of Capita, and go back to sending recruiting sergeants out into the pubs on a Saturday night.

****

I suspect the Tory Party lost the next Election on New Year’s Day, when huge numbers of railway season-ticket holders in the South East were forced to pay more for less. Many will need to take out loans to find the money for a miserable, disorganised non-service that infuriates its users even more by perpetually offering insincere apologies for things it will do again the next day, and has no intention of putting right.

It is only in the South East that railways are so vital. But it is also in the South East that the Tories cannot afford to lose votes. By the way, don’t tell me that the railways were worse under BR. I remember BR very well, and it’s not true. If they’d been given the money squandered on the fly-by-night privateers, they’d have run a decent railway.

******

If I ran a university, I think I’d start a course on just how utterly wrong most films are about the past. You could do a whole term on how completely false the new film ‘The Favourite’ is. It is supposed to be about Queen Anne. Almost everything in it, from the alleged Royal lesbianism to the rabbits and the supposed abduction of the Duchess of Marlborough is either baseless speculation or totally made up. Yet when I went to see it in a grand university town, the cinema was packed. Is it the same-sex love, the monarchy, the four-letter words or what, which bring the pseudo-intellectual middle classes into the cinema these days?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Charlie B, “I will never vote for an anti immigration party”

Which shows by your own words how illiberal the modern liberal is these days because they can never be swayed by facts or reality. You still won’t say how many can come? Einstein’s definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

It’s your policies, and people like you who are causing the anti immigration parties to take power (not me) in a desperate attempt to try and save their native cultures, and put a stop to your madness. Personally I wish this issue could be taken off the table if parties of both the left and right would unite in favour of putting the domestic population first.

I find it terrifying and pitiful how much contempt you and so many liberals now have for your own nations domestic population. (No wonder 5 million labour voters voted Brexit) It’s a form of lofty self loathing. The left claims to represent the poor, and working class, but bringing in endless cheap labour will do nothing for them. See what mass immigration has done for the black communities in the US over the last twenty five years.

Perhaps when you and your utopian chums have destroyed all the social programmes, and bankrupted the NHS you may ponder your cavalier attitude to your own friends and families. I doubt it, by then it will be too late. By then they will all have probably fled the country themselves. Made refugees from their own home by their own delusional policies.

As to your remarks about a wall. Seems to work just fine around Israel. Oh that we could have Israel’s policy of choosing who comes.

Charlie B cannot bring himself to admit his lack of objectivity. He constantly refers to the UK's legal and moral duties, which the UK is more than fulfilling.

However, he seems incapable of understanding that there is a limitless flow of potential migrants, all of whom will claim asylum and allege that they are in fear of their lives should they return home, even when it is to countries whose governments do not oppress their citizens. He also fails to answer the point that many of these so called 'asylum seekers' destroy their documentation because its disclosure would reveal their provenance and demonstrate that they are not asylum seekers, but economic migrants.

He makes not the slightest attempt to acknowledge the illegal nature of many of those who try to take up residence in the UK and refuses to acknowledge that a migrant is someone who chooses to live in a particular country and that an asylum seeker seeks safety and so should not get to choose in which country they settle. If their situation is as desperate as they allege, they will accept refuge wherever they find it.

Does Charlie B think that anyone who wishes to move from one country to another should automatically be admitted to the country of his choice? He talks in his typically self-righteous manner about his 'moral values', but it is apparent that these 'values' give no consideration whatsoever to the host community.

He also fails to acknowledge that it is perfectly legal for a state to remove an asylum seeker, even a genuine one (and not many are) to a third country if it had been possible for that person to claim asylum there. The UK is within its rights to take such action and should always do so, unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Palestine, and what has befallen the Palestinians is a classic example and warning of what can happen with an unrestricted open border policy enforced by those comfortably in control: one might even deduce it as being a true blueprint for the annihilation of the indigenous.

People who support tough anti-immigration measures often come up with the bizarre suggestion that those they disagree with should “offer unconditional hospitality [to migrants] in their home”. Really? So, if Mike B thinks there should be fewer potholes in the roads, maybe he should go and fill them himself! ***PH: This doesn't really work. We pay people to fill potholes, and when they have done that, they go home. If we permit large numbers of migrants in the country, they must live somewhere, use public transport somewhere, seek medical treatment somewhere, send their children to school somewhere. In the nature of things, they will usually live in the areas where poor, low-paid citizens live, rather than where the well-off liberals who applaud migration dwell. The jobs they seek and do at low wages will not be the jobs of newspaper columnists, MPs, TV presenters, etc. They will the jobs of builders, decorators, cleaners, bus-drivers, plumbers etc. As the poem goes ' The butterfly upon the road preaches contentment to the toad'. It is very easy to make free with someone else's hospitality, less so to do it with our own.The point is a perfectly reasonable one. ****** And if he thinks more money should go to the NHS, maybe he should turn up at the hospital with his cheque book! If he thinks there should be fewer pupils in school classes, maybe he should go and teach the children himself!

Also, Mike B leaps to the no less bizarre conclusion that because I call for the UK to fulfil its moral and legal duties towards asylum seekers, I therefore have “no concern for the general good of the citizens of this country”. Does he think that with each migrant entering the country, the happiness of the entire UK population is automatically reduced a little bit? I can assure him that this not a zero sum game and that it is in fact possible to have two thoughts at the same time: concern for migrants to be treated fairly AND concern for the general good of people in the UK.

Yes, my moral values guide me in my political opinions and I make no apologies for this. This does not mean that my opinions are not based on facts and circumstances, quite the opposite. It is one of my main moral principles not to let myself be biased by prejudice or first impressions, but instead to gather as much objective information as possible about a subject before forming an opinion.

Your statement in your above post, addressed to Sally, that you would "never" vote for a party opposed to immigration simply confirms that you are "parti pris" in this matter and that you are incapable of forming an objective view on the subject.

It is further proof, if further proof were needed, that, regardless of the prevailing facts and circumstances, your standpoint will be dictated by your bigoted and self-righteous ideological position and that the general good of the citizens of this country are of no concern to you.

You are clearly obsessed with virtue signalling and your own misguided, indeed perverted, sense of your ethical and moral superiority over the rest of us and, as such, you have lost any right to be taken seriously. You are manifestly incapable of original or independent thought and have simply been trained to parrot the party line.

Sally appears to blame me for the success of anti-immigration governments across Europe. This is kinda interesting, because, reading her posts, I would have sworn that she would support anti-immigration policies. I would never vote for an anti-immigration government, whereas she undoubtedly would. How then can I be the one ensuring that anti-immigration governments are in power? Have I somehow forced her to hold the opinions she has? Or is she too much of a coward to take responsibility for her own opinions, but has to blame them on someone else?

I would argue that the example of the refugees diverting through other countries to avoid the barriers in Hungary precisely proves my point that barriers do not work, since refugees end up finding another way through. A wall across Europe so long it cannot be bypassed would be a completely unrealistic monstrosity, or does Mr Meredith wish to take us back to the days of the Iron Curtain? Besides, the millions of € and £ spent on barriers, walls, guards, patrol dogs etc are an obscenity when you think how that money could have been used to improve the lives of victims of conflict and persecution.

If so called asylum seekers do not claim asylum in the first safe country in which they arrive, there is no reason for the UK to accept them when they try to enter the country illegally, as many of those in recent weeks have done. As I have pointed out, if they were not 'illegals", they could cross on a ferry.

To suggest that because we owe a duty to genuine asylum seekers that we should, therefore, make life easy for 'illegals' entering the country is akin to saying that because an occupier owes a duty of care to burglars, he should facilitate the burglary of his property.

As for Trump, I am no admirer of the man, but I would not criticise his policy on illegal immigration. I see no reason that any country should accept those who do not go through the normal process of applying for residency and a country is entitled to resist the mass movement of people attempting to cross into its territory in the manner we have seen in the USA in recent months.

I only wish that Frau Merkel had adopted a similar policy, instead of the one which she has; one which is storing up trouble for future generations.

Frankly, your virtue signalling and posturing; your refusal to acknowledge the obvious abuse of the asylum process which we have witnessed in recent months and years and your unmistakable willingness to accept all and sundry into this country, regardless of the effects on our society, makes you either unbelievably naive or someone who has no regard for the future welfare of this country.

I suggest that you make your way to Dover and offer unconditional hospitality in your home to any illegal migrant whom you find there.

Charlie B has still not told us how many refugees can come? He won’t put a figure on it, which means it’s unlimited and open ended. He doesn’t care if they are illegal or not. Many so called refugees are migrants in disguise. He won’t tell us how to stop mass migration. He puts the migrants rights above the rights of the host country’s people.

He trots out the usual platitudes that it’s all the west’s fault, but bizzarley its the west they all want to come to. Even France is not good enough for some of them them, they prefer London. How nice? Funny that. Perhaps our culture is not as bad as he would like us to think.

Also, many tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have now gone home since ISIS has been destroyed by Russia in Syria. There should be less, not more people coming.

All he is doing is ensuring that anti immigration govts are coming to power all across the western world, New govts in Italy, Austria, Poland , Hungary. Mrs Merkel has lost her majority and The Belgium Prime Minister had to resign after he signed his people up to the UN migrants charter. Then you have Mr Macron who is struggling to stay in office in France. Mr Trump is a pussy cat to what’s coming if this madness continues.

. . . putting in place more barriers to stop migrants (whether legal or otherwise) does not result in less migration, instead it results in more deaths. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the forces driving the migration.

Posted by: Charlie B | 09 January 2019 at 11:13 AM

I think you'll find that putting barriers in place is extremely effective in the places where they are located, such as Hungary. The fact that immigrants can still progress through Europe by going around them, diverting through neighbouring countries where there are no such restrictions demonstrates how much more effective they would be if constructed everywhere they are needed. Like the so-called "war on drugs," Europe's attempts at controlling immigration have been a failure only on account of their ineffectual, half-hearted application.

I think most of us understand perfectly well the forces driving the massive increase in attempted illegal immigration. Your inference that those who happen to disagree with your political dogma must of necessity be doing so out of ignorance of the world is nothing more than the same old standard-issue Left wing condescension and sneering that is routinely poured over anyone who dares challenge their mantras on open borders, drug-legalisation, education, crime and punishment, Brexit etc. etc.

The UK has signed Geneva Convention on Refugees and is obliged to provide protection to people who meet the criteria for asylum. Asylum seekers are legally entitled to seek asylum in the UK, however the UK provides no legal routes for them to reach UK territory. Does Mike B not understand the legal limbo that this creates?
People in Britain are quick to mock Donald Trump for wanting to erect a wall on the border with Mexico. But, as a matter of fact, the UK is doing exactly the same thing and shirking its legal and moral responsibilities in the refuge crisis.

Of course, refugees can travel with their passports: the problem is that bogus refugees destroy them to avoid being sent back whence they came.

You also state that it is not "necessarily true" that those crossing the Channel are doing so illegally. Is that so, Charlie? Then, why do they choose to pay up to 20,000 pounds to make the crossing in a tub when they could do so, "legally" in great comfort, and even enjoy some fine dining, for under 100 quid?

Peter Starr,
The true 'fevered imagination' is the one that believes this small Island can absorb the populations of Africa and the Middle East without becoming the very societies that those immigrants are trying to escape - especially when that 'fevered imagination' is its malevolent plot to do just that!

The issue of whether asylum seekers are traveling legally or not is a complete red herring.

Refugees fleeing persecution or conflict are usually not able to travel using legal documents (e.g. passport, visa etc.), yet they are legally entitled to seek asylum in another country. And, as I already mentioned, they are not under any legal obligation to apply for refugee status in the first safe country they enter. So to claim that those crossing the channel in small boats are traveling illegally in not necessarily true, nor is it relevant. Anyone who has paid attention to the refugee crisis for the past few years will have learnt that putting in place more barriers to stop migrants (whether legal or otherwise) does not result in less migration, instead it results in more deaths. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the forces driving the migration. Therefore to send migrants back to France because they are allegedly crossing the channel illegally will not reduce the number of migrants attempting the crossing, in fact probably the contrary. To claim that they should be sent back in order to save lives is not just wrong, it is counterproductive.

To Bill,
Let me answer your ‘fevered imagination’ question with an example from this blog. Someone willing to defend Yaxley-Lennon, General Franco, and the ridiculous Bonington-Jagworth, and who berates what he calls ‘Third-Worlders in this country’, would illustrate the term. Sound familiar?

The murder of Khashoggi does not confirm that the United States enforces its notion, however flawed, of international law. Rather, what happened shows that the US fails to impose order. In spite of having the ’most powerful army in the world’, US efforts in the Middle East have a habit of producing the opposite of what they are aimed at.

Roy Robinson: "strange that such a man [Trotsky] is still a hero to so many people including the present Labour leadership"

Trotsky was quite a hero for many in previous Labour leaderships - including New Labour - where most of the big fish had communist pasts of one hue or another. And it's not just Labour: Ted Heath was an ardent fan of Chairman Mao and Castro, as were David Rockefeller and other leading figures in the US establishment. In the same way many on left and right (not forgetting the so-called "alternative media") today extol the "achievements" of the current thuggish Chinese regime. If tyranny produces cheap smart phones for the masses none dare call it tyranny apparently. Going back a bit further, Karl Marx's connections to the 19th Century U.S. Republican Party really should be better known.

Posted by: Bill | 08 January 2019 at 02:48 PM
**The United States did exactly nothing about it. Why? …** Because Saudi Arabia is a very rich nation and is able to affect the flows of money - not only around the world – but especially the U.S. One could also ask why the US did not act against Saudi Arabia after 19 of its citizen carried out the 9/11 atrocity. Erh…?
International law, ethics, morality are way down the order behind money and that - is the way it is.

Ref: **dinghies really are a danger to Britain**
There can be no doubt that despite this nation’s faults it still **enabled us to create one of the greatest civilisations in human history** FACT.
I do however have reservation about some other points.
**Nobody can blame the migrants for seeking better lives else-where, **
I would say an ‘easier’ life somewhere. And whilst I have nothing against helping these in need there are far too many stops en route here which offer an ‘easier’ life + much better weather.
**People-smugglers are not fools**
Neither it seems are many of the fit and healthy looking male migrants who we hear have paid from £4000 – to £20,000 to smugglers!
They are not hostages either - and have made a decision to put themselves and helpless infants at risk –knowing that the British will rescue them. The use of infants to bolster their own case for rescue is a rather cowardly ploy. We see them in the boats and on the shores of Kent having probably abandoned their families in their homeland - or in other cases escaped the clutches of justice from their criminal pasts.
**Or we can do nothing much, and say goodbye to Britain. **
Fearfully Mr H., That horse has bolted (quite some time ago). It is too late. I can only wish that I could be able to hop off to another country so easily and begin a new life afresh and sorrowfully watch - from a safe distance - the ravaging of the carcass of this once great nation.

Railways. I notice that Mr Hitchens never tells us who was to blame for the problems on the railways. He also fails to mention that Network Rail is under public ownership; a fact that may help people decide if public or private ownership of the railways is a good or bad idea.
***WHY would that be so? Has he got this from some Central Office Speaking Note for Very Young Conservatives? NR is under public ownership because Treasury rules forced the government to admit that it was so. It is forced by the government to subsidise private operating companies through artificially low track use charges. A proper nationalised system would involve central control of the whole railway, track, signalling, engineering, locomotives, timetabling, rolling stock, maintenance. the accidental technical ownership of NR by the government means nothing. If he wants to know what difference privatisation made to the running of the railways, may I commend to him Ian Jack's 'The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain', which explains in detail the terrible damage done to safety standards and continuity by private ownership in the form adopted by the Major government. .

The villagers object violently and are then all shot down in cold blood.Trotsky shows complete indifference to these events which meet with his approval.He then continues with his journey,strange that such a man is still a hero to so many people including the present Labour leadership.

Posted by: Roy Robinson | 08 January 2019 at 10:15 AM

Just shows what a century of relentless spin can achieve. When it came to propaganda the Bolsheviks hit the ground running. The best investment Lenin and his gang ever made was in employing Sergei Eisenstein to make those fictionalised documentary-style films on the Russian revolution. Even now, when I try to bring up the subject of the Russian civil war which followed the revolution and is where the real, genocidal atrocities against ordinary Russians took place, I'm met with ignorance and head scratching from my fellow baby-boomers. A generation cultivated in the sixties on University Film Club showings of The Battleship Potempkin. Many of them have never wanted to learn anything which might puncture that particular precious balloon and still have their Lenin / Mao / Che Guevara T-shirts to prove it.
Hitler had Leni Reifenstahl, but finding herself on the losing side her evil genius for propaganda was exposed to the critical glare of daylight, while Soviet propaganda and its ubiquitous revolutionary iconography continues to be romanticised by left wing fantasists even to this day. Their dream version of Communism is far too precious to allow itself to be subjected to the scrutiny of non-believers.

You have made not the slightest effort to answer any of the points made concerning the illegal activities of those who claim to be asylum seekers, who have found asylum, yet still persist with their unlawful actions.

It is quite clear that you think of Britain as a dumping ground for all those who wish to settle here for economic reasons and further debate in the face of such bone-headed intransigence is clearly pointless.

Norman Norris says that Shakespeare was happy with our island status. But what does he make of the end of Cymbeline?

“Although the victor, we submit to Caesar,
And to the Roman empire; promising
To pay our wonted tribute, from the which
We were dissuaded by our wicked queen…
Let a Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together, so through Lud's-town march.”

To Brexit or not to Brexit? Would that thou, O Bard of Avon, with oracular song, might set our hearts at rest. But, alas, thou givest but riddling oracles.

@ Mike B | 07 January 2019 at 10:33 PM
There are several reasons why asylum seekers and refugees cannot and should not all be taken care of in the first country of safety they have reached:

1. The vast majority of displaced people in the world are already being helped in their own country or in countries bordering their own. Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon all have more than 10 times more refugees that the UK has, for instance. There is a limit to the capacity of these regions to accommodate growing numbers of refugees, hence the number of people migrating further afield, particularly if they have family or friends already settled elsewhere. To claim that the UK does not have the capacity to accept more refugees but expect them to be resettled in Jordan or Lebanon is absurd, as these figures show.

2. Half the refugees in the world are children under the age of 18. Even if they are no longer under threat, living in a tent in the desert in Jordan for instance is not an acceptable long term solution for children, from a humanitarian point of view.

3. The UK has a responsibility to help persecuted people in regions where the UK was instrumental in causing or worsening the conflict in the first place.

4. As the country with the 5th largest GDP in the world. The UK has a moral duty to help people fleeing persecution.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.